Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

1986, a year when Australia slipped to a silver medal behind West Germany in the Champions Trophy in Karachi, the team won the gold medal at the World Cup at Willesden in West London, where Charlesworth was voted ‘player of the tournament’ after being its leading goal-scorer. Australia beat England 2-1 in the final, and in the ‘pool’ section of the competition, beat India, for long one of the dominant sides in world hockey, 6-0, in a match described in The Times as ‘astonishing’ and a ‘rout’. In the final, before a crowd of 11,500, Australia had a 2-0 lead at half-time but then resisted a strong onslaught from the home side in the second half, with Charlesworth, perhaps reverting to his cricketing persona, prominent in the defence. In 1987 – the year of another election success and of a Champions Trophy bronze medal – he was elected Western Australian ‘Sportsman of the Year’ for the third time (after 1976 and 1979), inducted into the Sport Australia ‘Hall of Fame’ and awarded the Order of Australia. In 1988, after winning another bronze medal in the Champions Trophy, the last game in his long international hockey playing career came at the Seoul Olympics, where Australia finished fourth. Of course all the successes of that career were necessarily built on his continuing participation in the Perth suburban competition, for the Cricketers club – which he’d joined in 1964 – from 1983, and in 1987 and 1988 for the Westside Wolves, the product of a merger of Cricketers and four other clubs in the western suburbs. Playing hockey on Saturdays didn’t involve any more time in Perth than the normal electorate commitments of any federal MP. But, for all West Australian federal MPs, parliamentary sittings in Canberra involved flying to and fro across the continent some thirty to forty times a year, a punishing schedule that Ric labelled ‘Politics: Interesting Job – Terrible Lifestyle’ in his book, The Coach . It was a lifestyle especially hard on families and Ric’s own had grown with the birth of two more children – Elizabeth, on 26 January 1982 and Jonathan on 3 November 1984. Broken marriages among Western Australia’s prominent federal politicians were common. Among Ric’s contemporaries and fellow frequent flyers Kim Beazley – eventually ALP leader in two post-Keating elections – John Dawkins, education minister in the Hawke government and Senator Peter Cook were all divorced. After nine years Ric was separated from Frances and much of his son’s and two daughters’ lives had passed him by: ‘I didn’t want to 62 1981-1993